Forum Discussion
ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages
Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part.
These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.
Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.
Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.
Let us know what you think,
Mark
207 Replies
- Any chance view / read-only rights will be supported?
- Do you need the office graph enabled for the Activity feed to work?
Yes - for SharePoint homepage from the waffle menu will only display SharePoint site cards without any document activity related feeds- screenshot attached.
Will changes be coming to the SharePoint Homepage so users can organize the tiles? Or at least can you have the See All View alpha sort? It's extremely challenging to locate the desired site when you're following a lot. Also, we're still looking for the ability to control the colors.
This is not a part of the plan.
I guess "what's in a name?" - the mobile app is currently known as Outlook Groups!
what will the groups app give us over the sharepoint app or the onedriveforbusiness app and why do I have to have 3 different apps for the same things?
Hi, This sounds great! But I'd love to get some steer from Microsoft about what they see the purposes of Team Sites vs Groups are. It seems like they are getting closer and closer together in functionality. Some examples of when you see each being used would be great.
First, I'd say the main differrence in how to think about it is that it is not Groups vs Team, it's Office 365 + the full power of a SharePoint Online team site. Groups is the list of members, and SharePoint is where they get work done - right alongside the ability for the group to have a shared inbox and calendar, a team notebook, group Skype ("Meet now"), etc. SharePoint Online team sites have always contributed the default document library for the group, "Files." And with this update, we more fully expose all SharePoint capabilities within the same site collection.
LincolnDeMarisMicrosoft
The purpose of groups is for getting work done together. SharePoint is one of the tools the group has. Outlook for mails, calendar for calendar, planner for tasks, SharePoint for files, pages, lists, apps, Flows, PowerApps, etc.
- I'm sure that by the end of the Ignite conference at the end of the month it will be much clearer.
- Have there been any improvements to the authoring canvas?
We've had a lot of pain and suffering with Delve blogs due to the limitations for text formatting, especially for users who wanted more control over font size/monospaced fonts. We've also discovered and reported a bug that if you have Doc-ID enabled a site collection then the New Authoring Canvas can't resolve the URL (so, inserting docs doesn't work).Hi Kevin,
Yes, there are quite a few improvements to the authoring canvas that hopefully will address your needs.
We have added the following to text editing:
- Multilevel headings
- Stronger copy/paste behavior
- Left/right/center align
- We have not added functionality for different fonts, but capturing your feedback!
Additionally we have added a series of new/improved web parts:
- Document web part - now you can browse your site for documents to embed in addition to uploading one
- Embed web part
- Highlighted content web part
- Yammer web part
>We've also discovered and reported a bug that if you have Doc-ID enabled a site collection
>then the New Authoring Canvas can't resolve the URL (so, inserting docs doesn't work).
What about this?
- And can we see more to the Delve blogs while we are at it. It sorely lacks meta-data capabilities like tags and categories. We need to know when to let go of old SharePoint Blog Site and embrace new Delve Blogs.
Interesting news - we've been struggling with the puzzle about how to recommend a group or a site for our end users - this might have gotten a little easier now. Looking forward to testing this and assessing the value.
Thanks.
- Will this work side-by-side with the old publishing pages, or what about converting teh traditional pages to the new pages?
As a side note, all modern Web Parts are backwards compatible and work on older versions of SharePoint Web Part Pages.
That leaves a big question mark over server side parts. As I understand it they don't work on modern pages but there's things that only server side parts can do.Hopefully this will come in the future as I'd hate to be restricted to the older style pages.
- LincolnDeMarisThere are no plans to convert classic pages to modern pages - we probably will never do it. You can create classic pages alongside modern pages inside the same Pages library.
Not yet. The team is working on a plan to enable modern page creation for sites leveraging the publishing infrastructure. It is one area we chose to hold rollout so we can make it seamless and not step over existing page publishing processes. More to come soon about our approach here. Your feedback is welcome if you have thoughts or concerns we can share with the team...
- How will the end users get notifed on this changes? Especially to exisiting sites and groups.
The mecahnism for creating a new page in an existing team site is unchanged. When they click on the gear icon in the upper right and choose "Create new page" they'll be greeted with the new authoring canvas and new web parts in the toolbox.
And team site is all up new for Groups, with one added entry point from the home page to create a new page from under the site title. From the Group navigation, they'll see "Site" which takes them to the new modern home page for the group.
- How soon can we create a modern page on an existing SharePoint Online team site?
Hi Eric,
We are currently in the process of rolling out to our first release customers this week. We will pause our rollout during Ignite Conference (Sept 26 - 30) and then begin rollout to production starting the beginning of October.
Will be keeping you posted on our timeline. Excited for you to try out modern Site Pages!
Could we have an update please with regards to when we should expect to see the new home page for Office 365 Groups and the new Modern Team sites. Currently on my tennant with users added to First Release this is missing in action. I replied to the tweet here from Sharepoint, https://twitter.com/SharePoint/status/786589823389818881 indicating that all First Release customers should now have team site integration - this certainly is not the case for me. Our tennant is hosted in Europe.
Cheers
Janson
- LincolnDeMarisThese capabilities will begin rolling out to first release users next week. When the modern page capability is flighted to you or your tenancy, this affects existing team sites, and "new" sites that are associated with groups.
We will begin rolling out to First Release next week. And then some weeks/months out to broader production.
- Great news! A 25TB limit for site collections is great, but what about increasing the "Storage base per tenant" up from the laughable 1 TB and only 500 MB per user? Then we have to pay $0.20/GB/month or ~$200/TB/month to increase storage? This is quite expensive for a video production company like us.
We do understand the financials, and have consistently over time provided more storage as the default amount. To be clear, we did not up the amount of storage provided in this round as it was to increase the site collection limit - a common ask for information architecture. And we take your feedback and balance it with what the team has lined up next on the roadmap in parallel to the true costs of storage and balance on our end.
"$0.20/GB/month or ~$200/TB/month to increase storage "
We were quoted $114k for 50TB for a year.... Definately started looking away from SharePoint for anything but collaborative business data when we heard that!
